


A Choice of Prisons

by keilexandra



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:39:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keilexandra/pseuds/keilexandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phedre and Melisande next to Asherat-by-the-Sea: a choice, a loss, and a dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Choice of Prisons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kmo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/gifts).



> A story inspired by the thirteen Houses of the Night Court. I hope Lord Tennyson will forgive my cribbings as well. Thank you to my longtime friend Tian for the beta on short notice.

  
_part one: choosing_   


"I offer you a choice of prisons. This one..." Melisande gestures at the stone walls, the straw pallet and empty bucket, "...or mine."

I look at her, feeling curiously light-headed. "And what do you propose to do, my lady?" is the blithe question that comes out of someone else's mouth. "Break me to your will like a fractious colt?"

Melisande smiles gently. "Yes."

I swallow and look away. But I cannot help my next question, one that does slip off my own traitorous tongue: "Why?"

Melisande's laugh peals out at my absurdity. "Why not? Let us say, for pleasure's sake. Because I wish it."

Closing my eyes, I try to think, think of anything else but her, and unbidden comes the memory of Melisande's hand clutching my hair on the Longest Night. She approaches me in a few clipped steps and smoothes my bedraggled hair in a strangely gentle motion. It is the hand and the motion of a Mistress utterly confident in the loyal obedience of her pet.

"Come, Phèdre." A mere whisper in my ear, but it is enough to compel me to take a step forward, then another, then another, until I am nearly lost. In the haze of hot blood rushing through my ears, I cling to the thought that I have not given Melisande a response to her proffered choice, and so, I have committed no treason. Not yet.

*

"You are not very modest, Phèdre."

Melisande's voice, melodic and sonorant, holds a note of mocking amusement. I am kneeling before her, head bowed, eyes closed at her command since stepping foot outside my prison cell. I can feel cool but smooth stone through my coarse woolen dress, no comfort or cushion to my knees. The knuckled chill is another tiny aphrodisiac among many, as is her mockery.

"I was not raised with eyes averted, my lady, though they always are before you." My voice comes out slightly breathy.

Melisande slaps me. A swift blow, not so painful that I can't savor her fleeting touch and realize that I had expected, had sought this response from her. She knows it too, but she gives me what I'm seeking. "I did not give you leave to speak, my pet," she says silkily.

I keep my head low and my mouth silent, although my tongue flicks impatiently against the back of my teeth. The room is really quite warm, as far as stone-walled dungeons go, but the floor chills my knees to the bone.

I hear a soft sound from before and beyond me. Melisande seems to be dressing her hair with a boar-bristle brush. The distinctive rustle of each pull tweaks something inside me and I imagine the unforgiving back of the brush reddening my skin.

"If you obey me well, Phèdre, perhaps one day I'll spank you with this," says Melisande, giving voice to that fantasy. "Until then..."

She puts down her brush with a click and picks up something else. I realize what it is as soon as she approaches me, when suddenly my front is exposed to the hearth-warm, yet chilling air. With a single stroke, the flechette opens my dress into a shouldered cloak. I shiver, briefly and violently. In another instant, I feel the blade--colder even than the stone floor--retracing its path along the surface of my skin.

I would beg, if it might help me. I know it will not.

On the Longest Night, so long ago, Melisande carved her sigil on my right breast. Now she sets about recreating it, limning invisible scars upon the tender curve of flesh. I have no blindfold this time, but when my eyelids flutter from the first sensation, Melisande lays her fingers firmly upon them. "Closed, my dear."

And then she proceeds. My consciousness narrows, spiraling into the single razor-fine line--no point, but a line so thin it feels like a deadly thread--of the flechette in my lady's merciless hands. With each agonizing, languid motion, she parts skin and just a tiny bit deeper into flesh. This time, her artistry will scar.

As she works, Melisande says conversationally over and above my gasping whimpers, "I once studied the fragility of skin. How it loses suppleness as one ages, how quickly or slowly it heals when intruded. But Kushiel's chosen always heal quickly, no matter their age."

I grit my teeth and reply, "I subscribe to the motto of my first House."

"All loveliness fades," Melisande agrees. I can hear her lush smile. "But a flower mid-wilting is the most lovely of all."

Suddenly the flechette lifts from my weeping breast and traces the rivulets of blood down, always down, toward my swollen nether lips and the trembling pearl within. "And naughty flowers speaking without permission should be punished, don't you think?"

On the Longest Night, so long ago, I had gasped out my _signale_ on her command. But Melisande is not my patron and I have no _signale_. As tears follow blood along the valleys of my harrowed skin, I whisper, "Yes, my lady."

*

The next day, true to her promise, Melisande offered me her desk (its drawers securely locked) and clean paper to write on. No correspondence, of course, but it was a precious privilege to spill out my thoughts.

As I scratched away, she lounged on a cushioned chaise and said, "You may have three nights to experience what I offer. After that, I leave for the Little Court, with you or without you."

Abruptly, she stands and glides over to the desk and picks up my paper in mid-word. I protest--stupidly, I thought I might be allowed to keep my thoughts private, or at least to burn them--to no avail. Melisande reads aloud in a voice that has always soothed and provoked me:

"Or when the moon was overhead,  
Came two young lovers lately wed;  
'I am half-sick of shadows,' said  
The Lady of--"

"A poem that I learned by heart under Delaunay's tutelage," I say in the ensuing silence. "By a foreign lord called Alfred nó Tennyson."

"A lovely creation," murmurs Melisande, "which gives life to your beloved Joscelin. Is he so worthy of your devotion?"

"I am devoted to you, my lady. That will always be true. But it does not stop me from loving Joscelin. I cannot give myself to you and no other."

Melisande simply looks at me, and the feeling in her eyes is too much to bear, but I cannot turn away. She says, so soft it might be a whisper, "You give yourself to too many, Phèdre. You disappoint me."

***

  


  
_part two: losing_   


That night, she is kind. It is not an emotion I have received from her before, a compassionate kind of pity that makes me hate myself. Clever of her, to torture me while ostensibly soothing me.

"Rest," orders Melisande, her expression unreadable. She forces me back onto her bed and binds my limbs spread-eagle, but the ropes are barely taut and the flechette is put away, in its place the pricking tenderness of her fingernails. She knows my body well, pinching and scratching in all the right places until I am trembling on the edge of the ravine like an oak leaf in autumn.

Then, predictably, she is gone. Two of those clever fingernails pinch my eyelids firmly shut. A breath across my ear, saying solicitously, "Are you relaxed now?"

I could laugh at her joke, but I only want to cry, a feeling that pushes me closer to the tipping edge. Melisande waits for agonizing moments as my body reluctantly cools down before she says thoughtfully, in a somewhat different tone of voice, "I have a wager for you, Phèdre. Will you choose your beloved over your own nature? Can you?"

I would blink, but she is still holding my eyes closed. Melisande understands my silent question, and answers it:

"Tomorrow night, your last night of trial, you may have free rein of my dungeon. I will accept your attentions, even if... cruel. But if you cannot command me truly, then I shall take your actions as an answer to my offer."

Understanding flashes in the chartreuse twilight behind my eyes. We will swap places, Melisande and I. "Yes. I swear it."

And the wager is sealed.

*

Melisande kneels on her bed, her head demurely bowed and her silken gown replaced by a woolen prisoner's dress. I am standing at the foot of the bed and wearing that gown, which is long enough to drag on the floor as it pools around my feet. For a few moments, all I can do is stare: generous curves, ivory skin, thick and flowing hair. She is without fault or flaw, the epitome of unattainable elegance.

For, despite this night's bargain, I have no illusions about touching the core of her breath-stealing elegance. No matter that tonight she plays Valerian to my Mandrake--this, unlike any other time I can recall with Melisande, is a game.

As if she senses my lull of hesitation, Melisande looks up at me through her lashes. I twitch the short leather whip in my hand, but cannot bring myself to mark her pale skin so crudely. The whip, as she once said, is a lesser toy.

Taking a deep breath, I cast my eyes around until I catch a pile of coiled cotton rope. It feels stiff enough to abrade but soft enough to keep the skin intact, and the twist is fine enough to hold multiple knots. It will do nicely; another lady, Nicola L'Envers y Aragon, once taught me a few tricks.

I wrap and loop and knot Melisande in an intricate pattern, making sure that the tightest, most slippery knot straddles her shaved nether region. I secure her wrists as well in the best way that I know, although still there's a greater than half chance that it won't hold her. And then--and then I do not know what to do.

An indecision that Melisande takes full advantage of. Her head is free in this binding, and she catches my gaze with a confident gleam. As my sight fills with her, nothing else but her ivory skin and lush black hair, my hands scrabble randomly and close upon a black velvet sash. Somehow I manage to wrap the sash over her eyes and tie it around her head, and only then do I breathe again by my own accord instead of by her unspoken command.

Still, I don't know what to do. I can give her enough pain for pleasure, and perhaps a little more, but I will have accomplished nothing in the end. Just playing the game, like the obedient pet that I am.

Then I see the polished mahogany case, its lid closed but left unlatched and unlocked. I half-guess the contents before striding over and opening it to indeed reveal an array of perfectly sharpened flechettes, each nestled in its own velvet groove.

Melisande is still on her knees, but the bed raises her equal to my height. Her posture, upright and unbending, upholds her birthright as Kushiel's scion. She turns her head at the sound of hinges moving and says calmly, "Will you bleed me, Phèdre? Will you yield all my life onto these silk sheets and save your precious Ysandre's throne?"

It is not, really, a question. She knows it; I know it. She has known all along that I cannot deliberately kill her, and if I can't kill her, I can do nothing of use. Only play.

I permit, finally, my eyes to close and my hand to fall caressing upon the flechettes in their beautiful case. One slow blade glides along my fingertip, opening a tiny wound, and I say to Melisande the words she has waited patiently for: "I yield."

***

  


  
_part three: dreaming_   


Woken by the chill of a sudden breeze, I force my eyelids open and stare at the mold-painted stone ceiling of my prison cell. The window is barred but admits precious sea air as well as the endless mourning knell of Asherat-of-the-Sea.

Was it a fantasy, or a foreseeing? At first, thinking back, I assume the former: by her own admission, only Delaunay has ever made Melisande laugh.

Because she loved him. Does she love me?

As slowly as picking undone the hem of my prison attire, I begin to unravel the truth in my remembered visions. Then I glance toward the faithful guard Tito entering my cell with a wash bucket and a rare apple. He tells me nothing, but these symbols have been intentionally undisguised.

Melisande is coming.

***


End file.
